They Started A Chip Company

Yep. The above gentlemen have started a computer chip company. GreenArrays. And you thought making chips was a young man's game? It is true the young guys can work harder. But old guys can work smarter. And with enough coffee, on occasion they can work just as hard.

The chip company is more than old news to many of my readers.

What is new is that they have started a blog. It will be chock full of tips and entertainment - if banging bits entertains you. GreenArrays Tech

And in that vein I too have started another blog. GreenArrays and Forth. Which will document my explorations as a beginner. A journey similar to the one I made at IEC Fusion Technology.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Moore's New Law

I have an article up at ECN Magazine about some new innovations in chip design that look to reduce power requirements by a factor of twenty to one hundred for a given level of computing power. There is an example of this chip in production that can do over 90 Billion Instructions Per Second (BIPS) for a power cost of just a little over six tenths of a watt. Compare that to your current desktop or laptop machine.

It was invented by Chuck Moore of FORTH fame.

Details and links can be found at ECN.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Smart Idea

Jessie Jackson Jr has come up with a really good idea for breaking the government monopoly on schools. Give every kid a laptop.

Jesse Jackson Jr. wants the Constitution changed so that every kid has the right to an ipod and laptop.

I think his method is wrong but the idea is very good. At $100 per computer and 40 million kids in primary education the one year cost is $4 billion. For every school child in America. How much would it cost to wire up every school so the wireless laptops can access lessons and the Internet? That depends on how many buildings need to be wired. A good number for estimation purposes is 200,000 buildings at $100,000 per building. That is a one time cost of $20 billion. Internet service should be on the order of $10 per child per month. Roughly $100 per child per year. So that is a steady $8 billion a year (a new laptop every year and wireless service). Compared to the $11,000 per child average spending on schools in the US $200 per year per child is peanuts. If you pro rate the wiring costs over 10 years of public education the infrastructure cost is $100 per year per child. Bringing the total cost to $300 per year per child.

I don’t like the method (changing the Constitution) but the idea is brilliant.

In time it will break the government school monopoly. And there is already a company (non-profit) that is making suitable laptops for cheap:

One Laptop Per Child

I know one of the guys on the project. Very sharp. Mitch Bradley.

Update: 10 March 2011 1634z

A really good book by R. Buckminster Fuller on the subject that you should read at least three times.

Education Automation: Comprehensive Learning for Emergent Humanity

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Spending My Time

And for those of you wondering where I have been lately? Busy learning the ARM instruction set. Preparatory to writing a simple FORTH for the ARM. The whole concept is supported by a number of companies so code written for one company's chips should with modification work on another company's chips.

Right now I like the TI, ATMEL, and ST Microelectronics chips. For the time being I've settled on the IAR Toolset. If any one has any suggestions, I'm open.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

FORTH Is Back

The FORTH programming system is one of my favorites. The language is simple, compact, and extremely powerful, and almost dead. It has been kept alive over the years by a few fanatics including myself. Well, it looks like it is coming back in a big way. A lot of big names are now into the game.

By INQUIRER staff: Friday, 07 December 2007, 2:40 PM

PATRIOT SCIENTIFIC, which jointly owns a microprocessor related patent porfolio, said that Taiwanese firm Lite-On has bought a licence, becoming the third firm in a week to do so.

According to the firm, it's the first Taiwanese system company to buy a licence. Daewoo and a US manufacturer said they'd buy a licence earlier this week.

The firm's "Moore Microprocessor Patent Portfolio" that holds IP including seven US patents covering microprocessors, system on chip stuff, and microcontrollers.

This lot have also signed up for licences already. AMD, Intel, Hewlett Packard, Casio, Fujitsu, Sony, Nikon, Seiko Epson, Pentax, Olympus, Kenwood, Agilent, Lexmark, Schneider Electric, NEC Corporation, Funai Electric, Sandisk, Sharp Corporation, Nokia, Bull, Lego, DMP Electronics, Denso Wave, Philips, TEAC, Daewoo Electronics. And now Lite-On.

Now that looks like a rush. Why? Well, a dual stack architecture is pretty well fitted to C. Although C is not near as efficient as FORTH with such an architecture. EE Times Asia has more on the story.

06 Mar 2006

Alliacense announced that Fujitsu Ltd has licensed its intellectual property protected by the Moore Microprocessor Patent (MMP) portfolio. Alliacense is the subsidiary created last year to administer the portfolio on behalf of owners Patriot Scientific Corp. and TPL Group Financial terms of the licensing arrangement were not disclosed.

Fujitsu becomes the third system manufacturer to publicly disclose licensing of the MMP portfolio, following Hewlett-Packard (HP) in January and Casio Computer Co. Ltd last week. In announcing the Casio deal last week, Patriot Scientific revealed that semiconductor makers like Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) are not being required to pay royalties on MMP licenses.

Note the earlier date. About a year and a half before the Dec 007 announcement. Also note that I have a friend who works for the TPL Group. I'll have to ask him what happened.

In any case a little more background from the March 006 article:

Patriot and TPL came together in June 2005 to settle a long-standing patent dispute so they could jointly pursue licensing revenue from third parties. The TPL Group has been granted full responsibility and authority for the commercialization and licensing of a unified portfolio of 10 patents.

The MMP portfolio is named after inventor Charles H. Moore, chief technology officer of TPL Group, who is known for inventing the Forth software programming language and for his work in the 1980s on stack-based microprocessors.

It looks like FORTH as a chip architecture is back big time. I wonder if the language will come back as well.

In any case I really like the Fujitsu 16 bit and the Fujitsu 32 bit versions of the architecture.

Open Source

Sam Ramji is discussing how Open Source Software (OSS)has influenced product development at Microsoft. One of the principles is to be language agnostic.

Programming language agnostic
A given project uses a consistent language, but there are no rules on what languages are in scope or out of scope. Being open to more languages means opportunity to attract more developers – the diversity of PHP/Perl/Python/Java has been a core driver in the success of a number of projects including Linux.

We are not going to get much better at software development until we remove the inefficiency at the core:

The stack thrash C does on context changes. This means we write longer modules that necessary (to cut down on overhead). Which in turn are harder to test. They are also harder to think about.

Once we eliminate the thrash we can design a machine explicitly to execute the language. This gives you another speed boost, because there is no translation from high level code to machine code.

So language agnostic? I'll believe it when I see it.

BTW the language/system I propose is called FORTH. The basis of Open Boot and to some extent JAVA.

You might want to look at SEAforth. They have a .75 GHz processor. They put a bunch of them on a chip. Some pins have their own dedicated processor. You can buy them (in very large quantities) for $2 a chip. Each individual processor on the chip comes in at under 10 mW. When they have nothing to do they automatically sleep.

The logic is unclocked (it can be synchronized with external clocks) so it runs at the native speed of the silicon (as processed).